If you've been investing for any length of time, you've probably heard the phrase “stay the course” more times than you care to remember. Stay the course has been a refrain made popular by the great Jack Bogle to calm investors during rough times in the stock market. It’s become one of those investing clichés that might seem overused, but there’s a reason it’s so commonly repeated: it works. Over my career, I can’t recall a single time when “staying the course” wa…

I wrote previously about The Perfect Portfolio. Spoiler Alert: I contend in the article that there is no such thing as the perfect portfolio.   This is because we can’t foresee the future for investment returns, and we all have different investment needs. Even so, I believe that an investor can build a portfolio that is nearly perfect for them. How would someone go about achieving such a challenging objective? To answer that question, I li…

In the early months of the COVID-19 Pandemic, I engaged in many of the same diversions as many of you such as binge watching Netflix shows and surfing YouTube. One of my favorite discoveries was a series of interviews by the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering called In “Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio.” The program’s interviewers were Andrew W. Lo and Stephan R. Foerster, who have also co-written a book by the same title. These in-depth interviews were with…

Lately with more free time under the stay-at-home mandate, we have been able to engage in neglected tasks. While cleaning her home office, my wife Jan discovered an old Fortune Magazine from March 1996 buried amongst the clutter. I knew immediately that it would provide a treasure trove of interesting nuggets for an article. It’s fun to look back with nostalgia, but there are also lessons to be learned from the past. The year of 1996 was a pivotal time in my life…

Since the Covid-19 outbreak, many people have contacted me concerned about the decline in value of their investment accounts.   I sense that there has been more anxiety this time than during the previous bear markets, when stocks plunged even more. This is probably because the coronavirus has caused economic uncertainty in addition to a public health crisis, unlike anything we have seen before. This time it is different.     We are in the…